Topic
Plasmonics research, explained
14 open-access plasmonics studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Can a neural network design nanostructures for a chosen color response?
A neural network trained on simulations could read a nanostructure's shape from its light spectrum and design shapes for a target spectrum in milliseconds, matching real fabricated samples.
- Can boron nitride antennas amplify molecular infrared signals?
Tiny boron nitride ribbons trap infrared light as lattice-vibration waves so sharply that they boost a molecule's absorption signal and nearly reach strong coupling with it.
- Can DNA origami be used to print tiny gold antennas?
Using folded DNA shapes as stencils, the team made gold nanostructures with features around 10 nm whose optical resonances matched simulations.
- Can one nano-hole respond to twist one way and angle the other?
A tiny helix-shaped hole in gold lets through one handedness of circularly polarised light from the front, but from the back it instead filters by linear polarisation angle, allowing two hidden images in one chip.
- When light hits metal nanoparticles, is it hot electrons or heat?
Under steady illumination, almost all the light energy absorbed by a metal nanoparticle ends up heating it, and only a vanishingly small fraction creates the high-energy 'hot' electrons often credited for photocatalysis.
- Can graphene on silicon chips detect 2 μm light fast and well?
A thin silicon waveguide topped by graphene and a wide metal strip absorbs light mostly in the graphene, giving fast chip-based detectors beyond the usual telecom band.
- How fast do plasmon hot electrons jump into a 2D semiconductor?
When two kinds of plasmon in a gold nanostructure are strongly coupled, hot electrons pass into an atom-thin semiconductor in about 40 femtoseconds and more efficiently than one plasmon type alone would allow.
- How strong can light get in a gap one atom-layer wide?
Light enhancement in gold nanogaps rises as the gap shrinks, but at a single molybdenum-disulfide layer it falls well short of classical predictions, pointing to quantum electron tunneling.
- Can laser-excited surface waves pattern graphene oxide fast?
Scanning a line-shaped femtosecond laser over graphene oxide both reduces it and writes a highly regular nanoscale grating over centimetre areas, far faster than point-by-point laser writing.
- Can tiny gold antennas make a material switch with less light?
Placing resonant gold nanoantennas on vanadium dioxide lets picosecond laser pulses flip it from insulator to metal using about 20 times less energy and recovering about five times faster.
- Can a chip guide single plasmons from diamond light sources?
Single germanium-vacancy emitters placed inside plasmonic waveguides on crystalline silver sent over half their light into the guide, which carried it tens of micrometres.
- Where does the strong nonlinearity of plexcitons come from?
Mixed plasmon-exciton states in a silver-nanodisk/WS2 system respond nonlinearly at about ten times lower pulse energy than bare WS2, and the effect comes from the exciton part.
- How does infrared light change Raman signals in tiny gold gaps?
Shining mid-infrared light on gold nanogap cavities dims their Raman signal by up to a quarter, and the cause is the glass substrate's vibrations heating trapped water, not the molecules themselves.
- Can antenna spacing tune terahertz plasmons in a topological insulator?
Placing a second topological-insulator antenna at the right distance beside the first shortens the terahertz plasmon wavelength and, at higher frequencies, roughly halves its relative losses.